


Minutes

by Pixeled



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 11:58:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12911463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixeled/pseuds/Pixeled
Summary: Veld tells a sixteen year old Vincent Valentine what a mistake love is, and years later, as Vincent is dying on the floor in Hojo's lab, he has to agree, but he regrets nothing. He made his choice. He has all of eternity to contemplate what only took minutes to decide.Written to SONOIO's "Minutes".





	Minutes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dustofwarfare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustofwarfare/gifts), [TheCalamity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCalamity/gifts).



> This was written to SONOIO's "Minutes".
> 
> It's also a silent nod to TheCalamity's Vincent. Not quite in the same universe, but the nod is there.

He forces himself to stand still, to hold his hands in front of himself, to ignore the way his hair falls into his eyes.

He introduces himself. He is formal, polite.

He falls in love instantly like a teenager on a summer night filled with too much honesty, too much alcohol drunk from a parent’s liquor cabinet.

It’s her warm brown eyes, the crinkle that betrays she’s older than him, in her easy laugh that doesn’t betray how often she is too serious. She looks confused for a moment, mumbles something, and he can hear her question his last name, his crimson eyes. He ignores it. Just like he tries to ignore how beautiful she is.

He spends his free time painting her image on the backs of his eyelids, memorizing the sway of her hips as she walks. He cleans his gun. Takes it apart, puts it back together. Takes it apart again. Cleans it again. Her eyes. That warm laugh. They’re burned into his brain.

He doesn’t want to love her.

For a minute, for a moment, he allows himself to dream of her.

Summer passes into winter in what feels like a few careless minutes and with it goes his restraint. She teases him, she kisses him, she presses into the hard line of his body and she curls smart fingers around his rigid cock, takes him inside of her.

She is warm. She is good. She is holy. She feels like cleansing fire.

He’s never made love to anybody before her. He’s always fucked. Fast and hard and forgettable. But he remembers every time with her.

When she tells him she’s engaged he has his fist around a drink. Scotch. Aged. The burn that glides down his throat does not dull the roar of hate that claws at his heart.

He’s never hated anybody like he hates Hojo. And his love feels stronger in the face of that hate.

He remembers Veld telling him to never fall in love. It’s quiet and it’s night time. Vincent is sixteen, has never been in love—can’t imagine what it’s like. He doesn’t know his mother and his father is not winning any parent of the year awards. He has no shining examples. He lives with Veld now, endures his advice with a quiet crimson stare. Veld is making his fingers into the shape of a gun, tells Vincent exactly what he thinks of love as he puts the finger gun to his head and mimics it going off into his brain.

“First Turk to have a wife and a kid, and I’ll tell you what it got me. It got my arm blown off.” He gestures to his mechanical arm, sneers.

Vincent is quiet, looks at her with something like pity instead of ire.

He toasts to her engagement, downs his glass of scotch, dies inside quietly. Always quiet.

She can’t hold her liquor and she’s commenting on how he looks without his suit. It is a quiet evening in the tall mansion and she is drinking mulled wine to get in the spirit of the holidays. It’s her fourth glass. He has his gun tucked into his dark wash jeans. She says he looks like an underwear model, not a Turk.

Veld had told him once how he hated his stupid perfect hair, his goddamn perfect pouty lips, his angled cheekbones. He tossed him a pack of condoms on his eighteenth birthday, told him to have fun but not to knock anyone up because it would be the biggest mistake of his life.

But Vincent never really felt comfortable around girls. Never really “had fun”. He was quiet, he was simple, and he was violent. He’d been expelled from several schools for fights before his father gave up on his education. He didn’t know how to talk to anybody if it wasn’t with his fists. Nobody cared to talk to him, feared him. When he joined the Turks he could be silent, he could be violent where he was never allowed to be previously. He was a stone cold killer.

He fucked with the same intensity as when he killed.

But she wasn’t afraid of him. His dark blue suit and quiet demeanor didn’t deter her from trying to get to know him.

She talked.

He listened.

She was all light where he was darkness.

He told her things he’d never confided in anyone before. Such was the ease he felt around her.

He felt like a person around her—not a monster, not a killer. It was dangerous.

That night she asked him if he loved her.

He told her how he felt. He took her while he gasped that he loved her over and over.

She married Hojo anyway.

He was present at her wedding. He stood like a statue, a silent sentinel. Hojo cornered him, drunk and uncensored. Told him exactly what he thought of him.

“You think your pretty face and your cock are all you need to woo her,” Hojo laughed. “She chose me, Valentine. How does it feel?”

His spittle sprayed his face and he was unblinking, only wiped his face when the man was gone, returned to Lucrecia’s side.

It felt awful. He was so used to feeling numb that the tears, hot in his eyes, surprised him.

Later that week she told him she was pregnant and he walked over to the scotch, poured himself a glass, and asked her whose it was.

She told him it wasn’t his. He accepted this answer like he accepted that his father had abandoned him, like he later accepted his death. His mouth formed a hard line. He said nothing. He pretended he felt nothing.

He wasn’t so stoic when she told him what she planned to do with the baby.

“Are you sure?”

With her husband there she could be cruel.

But she was always cruel when it came to him. Just because she smiled didn’t mean it wasn’t razor sharp.

She had made her choice.

She took his still beating heart and tore it to pieces like it was just a piece of paper and grinned at him.

He hadn’t planned on confronting Hojo, just as he hadn’t planned on loving Lucrecia.

As he lay dying Hojo’s voice filled his head. It drifted in and out.

Veld had been right to warn him about love. How much it could rob you of things. But as he lay dying all he thought of was Lucrecia’s smile.

He never once blamed her.

He had made his own decision to die for her.

The minutes it took him to die dragged like hours.

The minutes it took him to love her had sealed his fate.

He made his decision within minutes.

He heard her voice sobbing. She was sorry. She had wronged him.

He heard Hojo deny her her son.

She pressed her hand against the glass of his imprisonment and whispered to him.

“I’m going away to where I can never hurt you again.”

But she was wrong.

He had all of eternity to hurt.

 


End file.
